First-Class Customer Care, Anytime, Anywhere

by Steve Lewkowitz

Home builders need to view providing good customer care as just as important as being attentive to customer needs during the sales process.  It is critical to maintain the previously developed relationship with the homebuyer and continue to build upon it.

Making customer care a priority ensures your company can profit from future sales opportunities, improve the efficiency of its processes, and elevate customer satisfaction, which can lead to referrals and more profits.

First impressions are everything, so good customer care starts when homebuyers are prospects and continues after they purchase and close on their home.  This means home builders must focus on good communication, which involves more than just responding to a customer’s inquiry.  Good communication should be quick and personalized, and it should provide the information that is requested.  This does not necessarily require additional staffing resources.  For example, automation features in a customer relationship management (CRM) system can provide an immediate automatic response to requests with exactly what the customer wants, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Continue Reading...

Best of Breed Systems and Integrations

by Alpana Arora

The Consortium CIO’s have done it again!  New Home Technologies (NHT) has partnered with leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) companies in the space to provide a best-in-class integration experience.  Three leading CRM companies - Pivotal, Sales Simplicity, and G1440 - have built “out-of-the-box” integrations with Envision, the leading online options management solution conceived, developed and deployed by the industry.  Constellation is also in the planning phases of their integration process, so we hope to announce their integration shortly.    

Web 2.0: What Are They Talking About?

By now you're probably heard the phrase "Web 2.0". What exactly is Web 2.0 and what does it mean for your web presence?

Here’s how I would characterize Web 2.0 in a  nutshell, based on what has happened in the marketplace, and what I have read and heard at various websites and industry conferences. I’ll also reference the O’Reilly definition, since O’Reilly coined the phrase in an attempt to sell more books.

Participatory Web and User Contributions
Applications that are centered around user interactions and get better the more they are used:

• Ratings and Reviews, YouTube, eBay Marketplace, Flickr Photo Sharing

Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy

• Users define how data is categorized. “Tagging”

Social Objects

The ability for users to share something about themselves with other users

• My Favorites
• Here’s what I’m doing right now

Blogging and RSS
The Live Web with RSS: Users are notified in real time, via a push, that information they’re interested in has been updated. You no longer have to surf websites for content

• Blogs: A fast and easy way to publish highly specific and targeted content that is shared and referenced by other bloggers via links.
• The high rate of publishing and linking from blogs gives them a disproportionate in shaping search results.
• Blogging creates chatter and communities

Rich User Experiences
Techniques like AJAX enable highly interactive experiences that allow the user to control and “play” with the website.

• Maps
• Drag and Drop in web mail
• Photo manipulation in Flickr

This video is very enlightening. Take a look.

Improving Performance Through Technology

by Mary Anne Schweers

Demand for new home starts may be down, but now is the perfect time to investigate how performance can be measured and improved upon with respect to building homes and company operations. When demand does increase, builders will be better positioned to manage how homes are built, reduce their cycle-time, and increase profitability.

AJAX - Bringing Interactive Back to the Internet

by Dan Naden

In early 2007, BHI relaunched and revamped the premiere destination for new home seekers, NewHome Source.  The new and enhanced NewHomeSource.com is focused on three key benefits: convenience, interactivity, and immediacy.  We’ve dramatically increased the speed and ease of accessing information by providing new home seekers with a simple search and results interface, map view, and descriptive home/community details. 

Measurement Matters: An Essential Tool for Building Your Website

by Christian Yee

Web Analytics: The Ground Floor

Home builders often come to the Google Analytics team with three questions that are common across any industry with an increasing online presence:

“How are visitors finding my website?

How are visitors navigating around my website?

And how many of my visitors converted to customers?”

These are the same questions that RE/MAX, the global real estate network, asked while they worked to develop a strategy for their popular website. In order to make changes that would genuinely help consumers and lead to new opportunities, they needed hard data to justify their decisions. To find answers to these questions, they turned to Google Analytics. (Click here to read more about RE/MAX’s experience)

Web analytics solutions collect data on the behavior of website visitors, providing metrics to site owners that help them improve their online initiatives. By acting on visitor data from solutions such as Google Analytics, businesses can improve their return-on-investment (ROI) from online marketing, optimize their website content, and drive sales or sign-ups (known in the industry as conversions), to name just a few of the most popular uses of web analytics.

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